14 DAY TRIAL // Sasha Levin announced this past weekend that the thirteen maintenance release of the Linux 3.18 kernel was available for download, urging all users of the 3.18 kernel series to upgrade as soon as possible.
Looking at the attached diff, we can notice that Linux kernel 3.18.13, which is an LTS (Long Term Support) release supported with security patches for a few more years, significantly improves the support for the ARM64 (AArch64) hardware architecture.
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.18.13 kernel. All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade," says Sasha Levin. "The updated 3.18.y git tree can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary."
Numerous drivers have been updated as well
Besides the ARM64 improvements, Linux kernel 3.18.13 LTS updates an enormous number of drivers, especially for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), Bluetooth, CLK, CPUFreq, CpuIdle, DMA, GPU (Intel i915 and Radeon), iiO, InfiniBand, IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management Unit), networking (Ethernet, USB), PCI, SCSI, TTY, and USB.
In addition, there were several fixes for file systems, especially Btrfs and XFS, but also for EXT4, NFS, and CIFS, many networking patches (IPv4, IPv6, and mac80211), sound improvements, as well as KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) updates. Download the Linux kernel 3.18.13 LTS sources right now via Softpedia or directly from the kernel.org website.
In numbers, Linux kernel 3.18.13 LTS saw 152 files changed, 1530 insertions, and 625 deletions, so we can report that it's a pretty big update, which means that all users of the 3.18 kernel branch will have to update as soon as possible. However, if you have zero knowledge on compiling a kernel, we strongly recommend that you wait for your OS vendor to update the kernel packages.